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Chapter 5: The Domestic Aquarium
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 5 the domestic aquarium Lives there a wife with ›axen head, Who never to herself hath said, “Oh, how I wish those ‹sh were dead!” —“a word for wives,” Aquariana, September 1993 The aquarium’s effectiveness as a surrogate for managing modern dilemmas comes not only from its multiple visual af‹nities, the expansive rhetoric of early practitioners, and the representational fungibility of toy ‹sh but also from its function as a home and the ways “home,” in this context, operates as a set of nested, mutually reinforcing locations. Nowhere is this clearer than in the period covered by this chapter, 1910–70. During these sixty years, as the very idea of the typical American home was in ›ux, the aquarium hobby morphed from a novelty to a mainstay of middle -class leisure. Along the way, the tank had a lot of cultural work to do. Between 1910 and 1930 alone, an increasingly heterogeneous middle class expanded by almost 135 percent.1 The tank grew along with it, spawning new and increasingly vocal commercial interests as well as consumer enthusiasts . The United States was now a majority urban nation, and during the 1920s, suburbanization began to intensify, increasing demand for a portable and manageable “nature” to compensate for the increasing absence of “the country” from “the city.”2 Electri‹cation, which changed the aquarium hobby by enabling relatively ef‹cient and consistent heating and aeration , became the norm; 85 percent of households used electricity by 1930.3 The wages of middle-class expansion fueled a recognizable modern consumer culture by the 1920s.4 Greater spending power was purchased through labor in increasingly automated and routinized workplaces—of‹ces as well as factory ›oors—rapidly solidifying organizational hierarchies and widening experiential gulfs between an “ideology of promotion” and the challenges of increasing competition and specialization.5 Women joined the 159 of‹ce workforce; by 1930, over 40 percent of working women were employed in clerical/professional capacities.6 All of these factors led middleclass and upper-middle-class men to aquarium keeping in search of respite through vicarious world-making mastery, fantasies of unalienated labor as ‹sh breeders/artisans, and the possibility of like-minded fraternity. The tank was so effective in its ministrations to these cultural shocks, so potent a container for the shifting tides of industrial modernity, that it weathered the seismic upheavals of the Great Depression arguably better than most other domestic leisure amusements, apart from movies and radio.7 The quickening pace of modern consumer capitalism, the anomie of the routinized professional workplace, and, later, the rise of the cult of the nuclear family in the 1950s reinforced a vision of the home as a little private world, a refuge from the rigors of the public sphere. But these same forces also encouraged consumers, including aquarists, to recognize the mutual interpenetration of “home” and the larger “world” through, American imperial adventures at the macro level and what Kristin L. Hoganson calls the “consumers’ imperium” at the micro level: collapsing “the distinction between ‘abroad’ and ‘at home’ by showing how they come together in the domestic realm.”8 The aquarium easily accommodates both. The tank in the living room was itself a living room for new generations of “happy families” and, with the advent of air travel and the rise of so-called tropical ‹sh, a small world after all. Even conventional how-to books captured this potent interpenetration of the local and the global. Some species which ‹nd their way to the tropical ‹sh market are imported, some are native, others of domestic cultivation. Swamps, ditches, rain pools, rice ‹elds, mountain brooks, lakes, and rivers in Egypt, Australia, Asia, India , China, Siam, the United States from the Carolinas south through Florida, Panama, and South America to the Argentine have all been searched and seined by professional collectors to put into the home aquarium . . . [The aquarium] is a little world of its own—a microcosm where all sorts of events take place under Nature’s guiding hand . . . Births, deaths, courtings, marriages, murders, brawls, and picnics—all the events depicted in a tabloid newspaper—take place within four glass walls. Aquaria promised the allure of vicarious travel to exotic locales plus the juicy details of family and neighborhood gossip for “so little effort that the realization will come as a surprise.”9 Mediating between home and world was yet another domestic realm: the nation. Here, the tank proved a useful rein160 parlor ponds [34.229.223.223] Project...